Homebrew Campaign

I'm currently in a campaign as a player and we are nearing the conclusion. I will most likely be taking over as DM next campaign and was looking at doing a homebrew campaign. I have what I feel would be a solid start but how do you go about preparing for session after or would it be prudent to wait to see where the players go and plan from there and essentially go session to session?

For a homebrew campaign, it is important to have multiple tiers of enemy planned and some vague idea how players will transition from one of these enemies to another. For instance:

1) the campaign starts with fighting Sahaugin, Merrow, and Pirates in a coastal / sea-faring adventure. During this part they find / come across a treasure map that leads them to the next part.

2) the campaign turns into a survival / dungeon crawl through dangerous tropical forest to a lost temple, through the monster-infested & trapped temple to find the pirate treasure. Removing the treasure from the temple unleashes a Lich / Curse that become the villains for the 3rd part.

3) The Lich/Curse release an army of Demons that start spreading across the land and the curse blocks out the sun. The party can go on side quests and ignore this threat but eventually the curse will catch up to them and they will have to assault the demon/undead-filled fortress of the Lich with its many magical traps.

4) Destroying / defeating the Curse reveals that some evil god is behind the whole thing, and now the party have to prepare to fight an actual god...

I wouldn't plan too far ahead. Plan the village where the adventure starts (keep it small so the players need to explore beyond it) and the first adventure. See what sparks the players attention, what motivates them, and then plan beyond that. Too many DM's over plan or create a campaign based off THEIR interests rather than the players. 

My advice is to survey your players (come up with a list of possible themes for a campaign) and then ask for their feedback. From there you can begin to plan. Session 0 is crucial for the players to make their characters fit the campaign and for you to develop hooks and threads with the characters in mind. 

If you do come up with a series of adventures or use a published adventure/campaign,  change it to suit and don't be scared to go off script to make the game more enjoyable. 

It really depends on how much experience you have as a DM or as a player, and how much your players have. If it’s your very first time I’d go for a shorter campaign, I understand why you wouldn’t want to just do a one shots, I personally find them a tad boring. Always remember that it is a collaborative story you’re making, and that runs both ways. The players need to respect what your plan is, but you also have to respect what they want to do, though a little guidance isn’t terrible. I’ve had numerous plans ruined since I didn’t account for them choosing something completely different. A lot of this depends on your personal DMing style, every dm I’ve seen has done things different. Some have a very “Yes, and” style (where they just follow and add on to the player’s actions and letting them create the main story), while many others, myself included have made a central plot and let their players work their way around it. Figure out what you prefer and roll with it. For planning sessions, I feel the same rules apply. Plan as much as you want to and feel necessary. I don’t plan a lot (mainly cause I forget to) and fly by the seat of my pants a lot, but it is fun for me, though for some DM’s I know it’s not. Essentially, just look at what the players do, and add onto it while keeping to the main plot (if that’s what you want to do). Most of all, have fun. Dming can be stressful so I hope you enjoy it.

There are a lot of different philosophies on this and you could easily get bogged down with listening to every idea anyone's ever had. The best advice I've been able to offer people is run published adventures first.

A homebrew adventure requires a lot of you and to be frank not everyone is up to the job. So if you've not DM'd before I'd strongly advise you to run one of the official campaigns. The simple reason is that it'll give you an idea of the ebb and flow of an adventure from the DM's perspective. While running that adventure you can be working on your own adventure in the background. Read as many adventures as you can get your hands on official or otherwise. As with most hobbies and crafts, reading and learning about the craft is what will build your knowledge base and make your life a little easier. So build your knowledge, read those adventures.

I personally have three approaches depending on the table and how the table runs.

Linear Approach
This one is very straightforward. There are maybe two or three branching paths, but eventually the adventure always ends up in the same key locations. This is most in keeping with the official adventures' style. The players are free to make some choices within a set of options, but those choices rarely have a major impact on the adventure as a whole. The adventure's conclusion will always be retrieving the artefact or killing the bad guy. The little choices your players make are things like sparing the life of a henchman by sending them to jail.

The Antagonist
This one seems complex but really isn't. The player characters are out to achieve a specific aim. In the previous campaign my Monday night group had the aim was to prevent the destruction of their home city which had been seen in visions granted to the PCs. This destruction was to be brought about by an antagonist. I 'planned' the campaign by working out what the antagonist would be doing at any given moment. If the party secured a particularly necessary and rare reagent, I asked myself how the antagonist would respond. I knew and had mapped out the antagonist's full plan, so the only real changes to that were deciding on those reactions. This allows the party to make more meaningful decisions and choices. If they destroy the reagents then the city is saved and it's up to them if they want to try and track down the antagonist and bring them to justice. The downside of this approach is that it can mean that the campaign's length can be variable. If the party decide to side with the antagonist, the campaign ends because the city is destroyed. They're not the heroes of the city they'd intended to be. So it's a kind of semi-flexible set up to the adventure. 

Full random
This is by far the easiest style of campaign to run. I set up a world or a region of a world to explore. The primary interaction with this world is through hex-crawl exploration. Each hex of the map has a random encounter (combat, exploration, or social). Some areas might be a lot more dangerous than others. The setup is usually that the adventurers are fleeing something (a crime in their past, their homeland destroyed, or even just for the love of the adventure). You can and often should drop more permanent points of interest into the map like villages, temples, trading posts, and even inns. Largely though this is a random adventure. For me as a DM it's such a fun way of running an adventure because I don't have to create extensive lore, or a villainous plan. I just rip random encounter tables from different books, steal inspiration from one-shots, and basically just mash together whatever random stuff I've found over the years. It requires little prep and is different every single time it's run.

The others above made a good point about deciding the overall style and length of your campaign. For your first one you don't need to play a 3-year long 1-20 campaign, you could just do a level 1-5 set in a single town that lasts ~15 sessions. Or you could do an even shorter 3-5 session single-arc campaign where the players only level up once.

Yeah for my first campaign I did Tyranny of Dragons, which is two campaigns. Let’s just say it didn’t go super well

I would hold off planning too much until your players make characters, or until you actually know you're gonna DM: you just said it was likely, so I'm gonna take that as not 100% confirmed.

Assuming you will, hold a session zero, and before anything else, ask them what kind of game they'd like to play. Goofy or serious? Gritty or lighthearted? That will tell you how to theme your campaign. Then, once they make their characters, and hopefully backstories, start building off of that. Work in some backstory elements. Players love it when you use what they give you, and it will help them feel more engaged and that the story is about them. If you're doing the game in your own world, and it's not fully written, you might even let them build the world a bit. Have them come up with some names of places or kingdoms or factions, etc., and build with those. Most players are delighted to see the things they made in your game.

Quote from WolfeCriedPup >>

I would hold off planning too much until your players make characters

 
While almost everything else makes sense, I would disagree with this one. Players ought to build characters for the adventure pitch, and certainly ought not build characters until they have a feel for what the adventure is aiming for. As an example let's say a player builds a level one Aarakocra because they like the thought that their character will be able to fly. If the next adventure is going to be a dungeon delve through the underdark that character becomes useless. Similarly, let's say the adventure is built around characters all coming from a ransacked market town in a highly rural area. A character built to be part of a big city's thieves guild isn't going to work. They certainly wouldn't have the same motivation to seek justice or vengeance as would the other characters from said market town.

I would pitch the adventure concept first, if they're interested then flesh it out a little more. Players really shouldn't be making characters until after that because it can vastly limit the worldbuilding and adventure opportunities possible.

Quote from ROCKYRANGER >>

Yeah for my first campaign I did Tyranny of Dragons, which is two campaigns. Let’s just say it didn’t go super well

 Tyranny of Dragons is notoriously a bad module. Good modules for 1st time DMs are things like Dragon of Ice Spire Peak, Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Lost Mines, maybe Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

Quote from Agilemind >>

Quote from ROCKYRANGER >>

Yeah for my first campaign I did Tyranny of Dragons, which is two campaigns. Let’s just say it didn’t go super well

 Tyranny of Dragons is notoriously a bad module. Good modules for 1st time DMs are things like Dragon of Ice Spire Peak, Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Lost Mines, maybe Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

 I didn’t hate the story, or even the stuff in the module, it just wasn’t the best choice for my first campaign I was DMing. I just said “ooh, dragons” and bought the book lol. I didn’t do much research, and my players didn’t know what to do. I’ll probably do it with a more experienced group since I do like it, but definitely don’t do it as a first campaign.

Hello, it is me, the DM who did a homebrew campaign for their very first campaign ever (which is still ongoing, we only started a couple months ago) with a huge storyline. I loved making a campaign, but it requires a LOT of worldbuilding if you're going to do something within a certain storyline. If you're just going to do a load of dungeons and whatnot, I think that a homebrew campaign is a great idea! You just need some quests and see where things go, and if you get an idea for a storyline or something, go for it!

However, if you ARE running something with a certain storyline, I'd recommend having a sort of overall idea. Antagonists, settings, arcs, starting point, ending point, etc. I would highly recommend listening to Just Roll With It: Riptide for an amazing example of a story-heavy campaign. Of course, you don't have to have everything in every arc planned out before you go for it, but just have some arcs in mind and some vague ideas for the antagonists and the BBEG of the campaign, if you have one.

If it's a fairly short campaign, then I would, again, have an overall idea of the storyline, but probably just make it one arc, or two, or three. A low number, in any case.

Hope this helps!

Quote from ROCKYRANGER >>

It really depends on how much experience you have as a DM or as a player, and how much your players have. If it’s your very first time I’d go for a shorter campaign, I understand why you wouldn’t want to just do a one shots, I personally find them a tad boring. Always remember that it is a collaborative story you’re making, and that runs both ways. The players need to respect what your plan is, but you also have to respect what they want to do, though a little guidance isn’t terrible.

 THIS. Don't plan too much in advance because you want your players to be as much a part of the story as you are. I've been DMing the same group for about a decade, for several long level 1-20 home-brew campaigns, and we'd all been experienced players/DM prior to getting together. I send surveys before session 0 to get an idea of what type of campaign my players want before I even start thinking about a story, asking for settings, themes, magic usage, etc. Once they vote for that, I come up with a starting location and pitch that at session 0. Everyone creates a character and sends me what they want for a backstory, THEN I start writing my story. I pick a villain first, decide on his motivation, and connect that to the character's backstories in a way that will get them personally invested. So my story is completely informed by what the players have already created. I usually have multiple layers of villain to kinda go with the different tiers of play. The level 20 villain is the overarching problem, but at level 1 they probably don't even know he exists. I let them decide what they want to do, give them some plot hooks/personal quest-related things and just sprinkle bits of my story in there as they explore the world/do whatever it is they want to do. They don't do well with being railroaded and they will always get into shenanigans I don't plan for, so I plan very little and just go with it, while my story goes on in the background for me to drop things into whatever they're doing. As they level up, my story/villain becomes more apparent...and they're already invested in it because the whole thing was created with the stuff they gave me at the beginning plus the stuff they've done/relationships they've built in the early levels. 

So short answer - don't prep too much, get player input on the story before you do anything, and prep kind of session by session so you don't get disappointed if something they do in session 2 completely derails what you planned for session 7.